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Cyber security Lessons Learned From ‘Panama Papers’ Breach

In the weeks since the revelation of thePanama Papers, the world of the rich and powerful has been reeling. A single cyberattack againstMossack Fonseca, a quiet Panamanian law firm, has sent a tsunami around the world, toppling one world leader so far, with more turbulence to come.

The attacker absconded with a vast trove of information, consisting of millions of documents, emails, and other information – so much information, in fact, that journalists and other investigators have been poring through it for over a year.

Still a mystery: the identity or identities of the attackers. Perhaps an insider with access to secret passwords? Or maybe a skilled attacker, well-versed in the intricacies of cyberespionage?

In all probability, neither profile is accurate, because the Mossack Fonseca attack wasdead simple. So simple, in fact, that a teenager with no hacking knowledge other than basic googling skills could have done it.

Furthermore, the security mistakes Mossack Fonseca made wereappallingly common. So common, in fact, that it’s fair to say most of the readers of this article work for organizations that are making at least one of the same mistakes.

Do you think the same thing that happened to Mossack Fonseca and its clients can’t happen quite so easily to your organization? Here’s your wakeup call:it already has. You probably just don’t know it yet.

What are you going to do about it?

The Mossack Fonseca Attack: Dead Simple

The attacker’s point of entry: older versions of popular open source web server software Drupal and WordPress. In the case of WordPress, a particular plugin was the likely culprit. “We think it is likely that an attacker gained access to the MF [Mossack Fonseca] WordPress website via a well-known Revolution Slider vulnerability,”according toMark Maunder,WordfenceFounder and CEO. “This vulnerability is trivially easy to exploit.”

Fixed versions of the Revolution Slider as well as Drupal had long since been available – but Mossack Fonseca simply had not updated the software on their web server. In fact, outdated versions of software that organizations haven’t properly patched is the most common cybersecurity vulnerability today, as I wrote inan article from April 2015.

The fact that Mossack Fonseca’s web servers were many months out of date was particularly egregious, especially considering the sensitivity of their clients’ information. “They seem to have been caught in a time warp,”saysAlan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert fromUniversity of Surreyand consultant to Europol’sEuropean Cybercrime Centre. “If I were a client of theirs I’d be very concerned that they were communicating using such outdated technology.”

The Revolution Slider weakness is notorious among hackers for its ease of exploit. Simply download and run a simple utility off of a hacker web site, and the utility immediately provides attackers with shell access on the web server, which means they can now navigate the server’s file system at will, uploading, downloading, and executing files however they like.

Normally, a company that hosts its own web server realizes it’s inherently vulnerable, and separates it from other, more sensitive systems and data – but not Mossack Fonseca. “Their web server was not behind a firewall,” Maunderadds. “Their web server was on the same network as their mail servers based in Panama. They were serving sensitive customer data from their portal website which includes a client login to access that data.”

In other words, Mossack Fonseca failed to take even the most rudimentary steps to protect their confidential client data. However, even if it had put their web server behind a firewall and separated it from their mail servers, the Revolution Slider weakness would still have allowed attackers to access data on internal systems – it would simply have taken them a bit longer.

Important Takeaways for Any Organization

The most urgent cybersecurity task for any organization is to ensure that admins have applied all security patches to all software, not just the software that faces the Internet. Your patching regimen should be prompt and thorough – but never count on all software to be properly patched.

The most diligent of patch regimens, after all, still have their weaknesses: there is always an interval of time between the discovery of a vulnerability and the availability of a patch, giving attackers an opening.

Secondly, automatic updates can cause their own issues, especially in complex enterprise environments and other situations that require high availability. “[Updating web site software automatically] can break your website without notice,”opinesLiviu Macsen, a web programmer from Prestimedia in Romania. “And you can’t do this on corporate environment. Updates are sandboxed and tested before production.”

While keeping software up to date is an essential defensive move, organizations must also pay offense as well by minding their data lineage.Data lineagemeans knowing who has access to your data and when, similar to how law enforcement must handle chains of evidence. You must also know what people are doing with your information and in particular, how they are securing it.

For the firms that trusted Mossack Fonseca with their confidential information, minding their data lineage was a significant weakness – and a vulnerability attackers were only too willing to exploit. “Attacks on third parties like external law firms, contractors and the like have been the main attack vector in the high profile data breaches over the past three years,” explains Adam Boone, CMO of security vendorCertes Networks. “An external partner like a legal firm also represents a path into the IT systems of the main enterprise target itself.”

The third important takeaway from the Mossack Fonseca breach: put your eggs in multiple baskets. Never give anyone access to more than a portion of your sensitive data. Furthermore, the more sensitive the data, the more you need to divide it up.

Such compartmentalization of sensitive information has been an important governmental intelligence tool for centuries, as only people with a ‘need to know’ have access to sensitive information.

In the corporate environment, such compartmentalization requires a new level of segmentation technology. “Without modern access control and application isolation techniques, [law] firms are wide open for malicious insiders or external attackers to get access to the most sensitive data,” Boone explains.